As an SEO aficionado, what do you think are the characteristics of perfect links?

John Hacking has ten perfect characteristics of such links. Read on...

Key word phrase in anchor text
Unless you put your keyword phrase in the anchor text (the text that describes the web site being linked to), you are wasting a lot of link power.

The link is from a relevant page
Google and the Google-powered search partners seek relevance in the interconnectedness of web pages.

The link goes to a relevant page
Another mistake that people make is always linking to the home page rather than to the most relevant page to the anchor text.

The link is from an authority site
Links from high Google PageRank sites are worth more, a lot more, than links from other sites. It's all about trust. Links from .gov, and .edu sites are also reported as having more weight than standard links. They are also more difficult to get adding to their perceived quality.

The link is at top of the page
Links from the top of a page (except for the header), are said to have more weight than links at the bottom of pages. It's the same with keyword phrases.

The link is one-way, not reciprocal
Google's algorithm looks for link exchanges between sites and rates these links lower than straight one-way links.

The link is within the body copy - not an advertising zone
Linking should be a natural part of the body copy.

The link does not have a nofollow tag
The nofollow tag is a recent innovation that tells the search engines that although I am linking to this other page, I do not vouch for the page's integrity.

There are few links on page (less than 20)
One link to your web site from a page with hundreds of links does little for your SEO results. The page's SEO power is being distributed over all the other links on the page.